(Translated from
my original Italian text by Nicholas Green)
Stephan Jenkins (vocals) and Irishman Kevin Cadogan (guitar) formed Third Eye Blind (or 3EB) in San Francisco. Their single Semi-Charmed Life made a killing among fans of intelligent hard rock, with its syncopated rhythms and a catchy chorus, a little bit of the Spin Doctors mixed with a little bit of Green Day.
Over the length of the album Third Eye Blind (Elektra, 1997) the group somewhat loses its way. Losing A Whole Year, Graduate, and London still make good use of formidable hard-rock edifices, but these songs more or less rehash the single with less of its brilliance.
The psychodramatic excursions of Narcolepsy and God Of Wine, add pathos to the album's emotional landscape, while the crescendo of Motorcycle Drive By (from acoustic to punk-rock) and the reggae-tinged ballad I Want You darken this landscape up to the limits of Smog's threnody. Too many of the other songs drag on without any force behind them, and with a persistent verbosity that further weakens the sound.
(Original text by Piero Scaruffi)
Possibly preoccupied with distancing themselves from the stereotype of their
hit Semi-Charmed Life, Third Eye Blind's sophomore album Blue (Elektra, 1999)
opens with the loud and fast, almost hardcore, ejaculation of
Anything. From here it's one frenzied mess of
Green Day's popcore (10 Days Late),
Seattle's grunge (1000 Julys),
Slade's glam-rock (Red Summer Sun).
A chronic deficiency of catchy tunes (only the slower Never Let You Go
may survive) and a stubborn faith in the power of the guitar-drums-bass
dogma do not bode well for the future.
Best track could be the slightly psychotic and heavily reverbered
Camouflage, an angry Elvis Costello chant tuned to (finally)
psychedelic noises. More sound effects surface in the closing Darwin,
but it's the proverbial "too little too late".
The first album's lack of focus has translated into the second album's
alarming focus on achieving arena-rock status.
Out of the Vein (2003) sounded even more trivial, and
Ursa Major (2009) was burdened by a lot of redundant material.
Then came Dopamine (2015),
Screamer (2019) and
Our Bande Apart (2021), all equally faceless.
